Introduction

Saturday, December 8, 2012

The Joy and Heartbreak of Flexibility

Exit the #11

I heard Forrest Claypool speak at City Club this week, and
he did a good job of explaining the difficult and ultimately successful task of
reprioritizing, getting labor concessions, and making service cuts to balance
the CTA’s budget. One of those cuts was the #11 bus through Lincoln Park, and
it’s making a lot of people angry. Still, on the whole, it’s an impressive
achievement.

Seventy years ago, transit agencies decided buses are better
than streetcars because the routes can be added, discontinued, or redrawn at
any time. Buses are flexible. That’s a big advantage for a transit agency
that’s trying to balance its budget in the face of changing demographic trends
like urban divestment, suburban sprawl, white flight, and so forth. It’s not
the CTA’s job to make the city a better place to live, to help it attract
people from the suburbs, or outcompete other cities. The CTA is just supposed
to take people where they want to go.

If cancelling the #11 bus means a steep decline in foot
traffic on Lincoln Avenue, and businesses fail up and down the street, that’s
not the CTA’s fault. If you’re too young or too old to drive, or just too
sensible to spend $12,000 a year on a car (the average in Chicago), you’ll have
to walk to the L—but that’s not the CTA’s fault. And if Lincoln Avenue becomes
a place to drive through instead of a place to live, and that spoils the
quality of life and causes property values in the neighborhood to decline,
that’s not the CTA’s fault either.

I know Forrest Claypool cares about repopulating the vacated
parts of our city and making Chicago easier to get around in. I know he wants
to grow the economy and reduce traffic congestion. I know he cares about
helping Chicagoans reduce their household debt, waste less on driving, and
invest more in real estate or their kids’ education. I know he wants us to be
able to take transit to work so we don’t have to spend two or three hours of
every workday working to pay for the car that got us there. I know he wants to
fix all that. He just needs more tools in the toolbox.

Enter the Streetcar

Cities all over the United States are either building or
planning modern streetcar lines. For the most part, they’re not transit
projects—other cities don’t have the kind of population density and transit
ridership we do in Chicago to make their streetcars cost-effective as transit
systems. Instead, American streetcars are usually business and property
development initiatives. Everywhere they go in, they increase property values
and boost local business. They spark economic growth and urban revitalization.

Why? Because the public commitment to building streetcar
infrastructure—to putting tracks in the street—mitigates the risk for
developers and investors. It ensures that the location will retain its value
regardless of gas prices and recessions. It’s a promise of lasting convenience
and walkability for businesses and homeowners alike. That spurs and channels
growth all along the streetcar line.

For the CTA, the big advantage of the bus is flexibility.
But you don’t want flexibility if you just signed a fifteen-year lease. You
don’t want flexibility if you just bought a big apartment, thinking you could
afford it because you weren’t going to have to own, maintain, insure, fuel, and
park a car. You don’t want flexibility if you’re thinking of investing in a new
mixed-use transit-oriented development. The homeowner doesn’t want flexibility,
the developer doesn’t want flexibility, and the banker doesn’t want flexibility.
Everybody engaged in building up a neighborhood, in making it more vibrant and
convenient and fun to live in, wants reliability. Predictability.
Commitment.

The streetcar is not just about taking people where they
want to go, it’s about building strong, enduring neighborhoods.

Blog Archive

about this blog

I love my neighborhood.

I live in Lakeview in Chicago. We’re close to beautiful Lake Michigan and downtown Chicago. There’s no place I’d rather live. But I’ve lived in enough different places to recognize that our streets are overrun with cars: they’re not inviting for shopping and strolling around, and they’re not safe for biking. Our streets are congested with through traffic and parked cars, and public transit here is buses stuck in traffic.

But this blog is not about problems, it’s about solutions.

Many cities around the world have revived their local economies by investing in walkable urbanism: one pedestrian-priority transit-optimized shopping street at the heart of each neighborhood. We could do that.

Chicago is big enough for one street in one neighborhood that prioritizes shopping and transit over parking and driving.

This blog is not going to make any sense to you unless you’re willing to do three things:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I studied English at Michigan, worked as a carpenter for a couple of years, and went to Sweden for a graduate program in architecture. I lived and worked there for eight years, riding streetcars and biking all over the city year round in protected bike lanes. I lived in downtown New York City for ten years, where I had my own small design firm, DNA, and lived in quiet, walkable neighborhoods free of through traffic. I’ve been in Chicago since 2008.

One thing I learned from my career in architecture is that if you’re waiting for someone to ask you to do what really needs to be done, you’re probably going to wait forever. There are a thousand reasons to hire an architect, but none of them is to optimize the neighborhood, revitalize the city, or transform the nation’s economy.

The Chicago Streetcar Renaissance is not about bringing the old trolleys back to life, it’s about using modern streetcars as a catalyst for bringing new life to Chicago’s neighborhoods. It’s not about the trains, it’s about the people—the lives of the people who live and work and play here.